It's not that simple. Ah! That phrase is Male for 'I'm afraid to.' - Karl Schroeder

He was acutely aware of how little attention the people who lived here actually paid to their immediate environment. They seemed cut off from their own senses, cocooned away from their bodies in the infinite spaces of inscape. Cybernetic realities were more real to most people now than their own lives, it seemed. And any connection between those internal spaces and the physical world seemed entirely accidental.

“Then you have no more wish to rule? The country needs you now more than ever.”
She shook her head. “I’ve been crushed under the weight of power all my life. I think I’m going to enjoy missing it.” She laughed at the lightness with which she dismissed royal power. Every moment was a surprise, these days. She hoped that that feeling would never end.

In the end, her written ideology, the philosophy and new morals she had preached, were all means to an end. That end could never be reached; Armiger had taught her that. If so, then what mattered their disappointment, their disillusionment? They would hate her for leaving them alive, but they would be alive, and a life lived in bitterness was still better than a death colored by useless fanaticism.